This was the part T.C. hadn’t wanted, the reason he’d told his mama not to come, and the reason he wanted to crawl under the steel bed in his cell when visiting hours approached.
“How’s he doing?” he asked, because he couldn’t not ask at this point and because he wanted to know, but he was afraid of what he would do with the information, how it would haunt him once his mother was gone, and it was just him and those four walls and all the time in the world to consider what might have been.
“Oh, he’s good, real good, baby. Saying some words. Mama and—” She stopped. “I think I’ve even heard him say MawMaw once or twice. I want to bring him by, son. Alicia doesn’t want to come herself, and that’s her business, but she said I could bring Malik, and I want to. Maybe next time, for your birthday?”
“No, Mama, hell no,” he shouted so she wouldn’t bring it up again. “I can’t have my son seeing me like this, thinking it’s all right to go to jail.”
“Oh, he’s not going to even know what jail is.” His mama lowered her voice as if she had been the one screaming. “He’s a baby.”
“Yeah, but that stuff sticks with lil’ kids, and if he keeps coming, in a couple years, he’ll be old enough to remember. I don’t want him to ever think of me like that.”
His mama just nodded. “I understand,” she said. “I understand.” She took her time saying the rest. “I just thought it would be good for him to see you. The thing is, I want him to know his father. Children don’t need their parents to be perfect, they just need them to be there, they get so much from that, and I just, well, I always wished I had pushed your relationship with your father more. He wasn’t perfect, but he was your father, and that was something. I just don’t want to see Malik go through what you did.”
Time was called on the session, and T.C. told her he would think about it, call her next week. But the thing was, there wasn’t anything to think about. It was one thing to be in there, to know that he had gone back out of his own stupidity—that ate at him enough. But to see his best thing, the person he’d let down most thoroughly, witness what a fuckup he’d become, well that would have broken him, and he didn’t think he’d be able to recover.
He told his mama as much when he called her on Saturday. “I just can’t do it, Mama,” he said. “It’s only three years. I’ll start fresh with him when I see him then.”
“I understand,” she repeated. “Say, Alicia’s over here, just dropping him off. She wants to talk with you.”
“Okay.” His heartbeat was going. He hadn’t had the nerve to call her since going in, and he thought that was a good thing. She deserved better than him, better than what he’d done, and what it had made out of all of them.
“Hey, T.C.,” she said. She sounded all right too.
“Hey, Licia.”
They didn’t talk for a while; there was just something about the air between them, and when he went a long time without experiencing it, it commanded awe just to behold it.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said finally. “I’m so sorry, but I know that’s not good enough.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.” She sighed.
“You deserve better than this. You deserve better than me,” he added.
“I know that too,” she said. She paused. “And I’m going to get it. But our son, now that’s a different story. Miss Jackie said you don’t want to see him?” She paused, waiting for T.C. to answer, but he didn’t know what to say.
Finally, he muttered, “I just don’t want him to see me like that, Licia.”
“Oh, I get it, I do, but don’t do that, T.C. I mean, I hear what you’re saying, but think about it, think about him, think about everything you went through not having a daddy.”
“I didn’t need that bastard.”
“Oh? Well, I’m not saying he was a great man, but if he could have gotten it together for you and made you part of his life, I can’t see how that would have been a bad thing. Maybe I deserve better, but there’s no better our child could do than his own daddy.”
She paused again. “Can you at least think about it for me, T.C.?”
He nodded before he spoke, he was too choked up. Then he croaked out a hacked-up yes.
“Good. Well, I gotta get going, but you doing all right?”
“Yeah, I’m all right, you know it’s all relative.”
She laughed. “Well, I’m glad. Miss Jackie says you look good. I hope you feeling that way too. I’m going to put her back on, okay?”
“All right. Alicia, you take care.”
But she had already passed the phone.
He could hear Malik crying in the background, and his mama said she needed to tend to him. T.C. set the phone down, imagined seeing his son in the waiting area down the hall, staring across from him, or maybe T.C. would have a chance to hold him.
As the day approached, he got excited, dapping off every inmate he passed, retelling the birth story, bragging about how alert the baby had been even at a few months, how he had the same nose and eyes as his daddy, how he was already saying words, Mama and MawMaw.
Then a couple days before the visit, T.C.’s mood shifted without his consent. The thing was, he’d never thought he was good enough to father someone as perfect as his son, and then he’d gone and proven that by getting himself locked up. Now he had a constant, gnawing reminder of his own inadequacy, and that pain threatened to eat him alive. He almost called his mother to cancel the visit, but he remembered Licia, Licia who had been so patient and forgiving, who had asked only this one thing of him, who had thought it would be good for their child, and maybe she was right.
He gave one of the inmates his brownies so he’d twist his locks the morning of the visit. T.C. was glad for the activity. It plucked him out of the dread that would have consumed him; it distracted him from the image of his son lying against his jail clothes.
“What’s the matter, Lewis? People are usually happy to go see their family,” the white CO said as they walked.
“I am,” he said. “Just nervous, that’s all.” He tried to smile but it didn’t come out right.
When he got to the door, he saw his mother. She was leaning over to wipe Malik’s mouth where he’d drooled. T.C. could still just back out, and she wouldn’t even know he had seen them, but he wouldn’t have his son thinking he’d been abandoned.
He walked over. She stood up to hug him, then when he sat down, she plopped Malik in his lap. The baby didn’t cry the way T.C. expected him to.
“He goes to everybody, huh?” T.C. asked.
“Not really,” she smiled. “But he’s going to you.”
T.C. didn’t know what to say to him. Before, when he was on the outside, he’d just talk in baby talk, lift him up to the sky until he squealed, but he felt funny doing that here, now, unfit somehow.
His mama just talked like she did, and he used that time to examine his son. The baby seemed to be doing the same back.